... or not: Mikita Brottman Reluctantly Enters The Reading Debate. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
"One of the great pastimes of the literati, aside from complaining about the Bush administration and attending live tapings of A Prairie Home Companion, is collective hand-wringing about the sad fact that Americans no longer read."
What a wonderful encapsulation of America's bien-pensant class.
Once again, Richard Rodriguez is on the money: ' "I suppose I am," he replies when asked whether he is ambivalent about the value of reading. "But then again, I am ambivalent about many things in life that are also good. Everything comes at a price. To be a good student separates the child from his uneducated parents. That doesn't make education bad. It merely means that education has social consequences, not all of which are easy or pleasant." '
Like Richard, I am ambivalent about a lot of things.
Two final points:
First, the strongest argument against Plato's objection to books and reading is that you have to read a book to get at them.
Second, what is the point of the debate other than that some books are worth reading and others not, that the book you like someone else may not like, and that books are a supplement to living not a substitute for it.
I've been collecting examples of quotes and articles concerning the decline of reading, and parts of this story will surely be worked into my next post on the subject. And I'm sure there will be a next post, because people seem to have been debating whether reading is good or bad for you since the origins of the English novel.
ReplyDelete(In addition, rereading Steven Johnson's Dawn of the Digital Natives might not be a bad idea.